AMA Event Provides Quick, Comprehensive Learning for Busy Marketers

Last month's AMA Boston Premier event, Implementing Social Media into Your Strategic Marketing Plan, highlighted the importance of short, comprehensive workshops for busy marketers. The event sold out in record time-about two weeks. Social media is a hot topic, with many attendees noting that the importance of social media is growing within their own marketing mix at their organizations.

Should you be on Facebook? How can you use LinkedIn? Should you use some of these tools? All of these tools? The event helped marketers to answer these questions through real-world case studies drawn from a variety of sectors, from financial services to the food industry to nonprofits. Among the vital take-aways from this session:

Knowing why people take part in social media is essential if you want to understand how to market to your audience using the medium. Stephen Jenvey of b4south addressed this fundamental issue using a case study from financial services. His take: people have a presence on sites such as Facebook to express some aspect of their personalities. If you built a social media site for your company, it's vital to address that need. Doing so helped overcome the low engagement levels normally seen in the financial industry for Fidelity.

Be prepared for a time commitment if you plunge into social media. Justin Levy of New Market Labs brought this point home, but added that, while the time commitment for doing social media is high, the financial costs are low, making social media marketing a good choice for organizations that can afford staff time, but not a big ad budget.

Non-profits need a different approach to social media. Jay Welz of Dana Farber noted that nonprofits can best leverage social media to raise awareness of their organization, spread the word about events, and increase engagement with constituents. Fundraising is also a growing use for social media. Links from your social media presence, whether it's Tweets about your newest initiatives, or a Facebook page, can be a way to reach donors that other efforts are not resonating with....or not reaching at all.

Integrating social media profiles with behavioral data can make for highly targeted communications. Mike Lewis of Awareness Social Media Marketing offered examples drawn from B2C clients to show how combining information from different silos can create a powerful consumer experience that can boost customer retention.

Events such as this can be a great boon to today's time-strapped marketing professionals-in the course of one evening or half-day event, you can learn the fundamentals of a key topic and come away with knowledge you can apply in your next campaign. One of next month's events, Design Thinking: Boost the Innovation Fire Power at Your Organization, will pack insights from Continuum's comprehensive consulting services into a 4-hour workshop on creative solutions in a host of business situations. It promises to be a great event.